tell me i’m handsome in the low light of recoil flash

kiss me silly under the tarp in the back of a pickup truck

go on tell me i’m beautiful while the AI-powered traffic camera scours the city for

my old face

the me i was before the war came home

before robot dogs patrolled the produce aisle

before Apple sold us android versions of ourselves

before the governor pulled the sheet out of his closet full of sheets

before denial fell away like dry husks 

back when it was still safe to say fuck the police in public

hold me under a sunset reddened by surveillance sirens

press into me like it’s our last chance at camouflage

i want to say that recent headlines concern me

but we planted two rows of zucchini at the community farm yesterday

all i can think about is their hollow stems

their fragile insistence on growth

how soon fruit will be ready for harvest

how it’ll reach the hands of New Afrikans deprived of organic food and land in West Oakland

how this simple act is the first step outside a system bent on breaking Black folks

how we are surrounded by liquor stores and campaign ads pushing equal amounts of poison

in three months the zucchini plants will shrink to an exhaled lung of a thing 

a brittle relic of dead flesh 

a monument to its own full life

empires have their time in the sun and must be buried eventually too

their demise isn’t as inevitable as growing seasons

so we’d best grab an ax and get busy 

the armed security outside the Dollar Tree will multiply

so dance with me this Saturday like Sunday morning we got children to sharpen 

like there are seeds to sow

like there are lenses to smash

like there are fires to start

like there’s something we can do right now 

before it’s t—